Amour powers debut novel

Updated 2:08 pm, Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Susan Conley will be talking about her first novel, "Paris Was the Place" at the Wilton Library on Wednesday, Sept. 25 and the Darien Library on Thursday, Oct. 3.
Photo: Contributed Photo

Susan Conley will be talking about her first novel, "Paris Was the...

A multi-tiered love, story set in 1989 Paris, is played out in Susan Conley's acclaimed first novel "Paris Was the Place." Conley's book tour will bring her to the Wilton Library on Sept. 25 and the Darien Library on Oct. 3.
Photo: Contributed Photo

Love of many different types powers Susan Conley's first novel, "Paris Was the Place" (Knopf, $26.95), which has been receiving very strong reviews since it was published last month.

Conley's protagonist, Willie, moves to Paris to be with her beloved brother, Luke, and her best friend, Sara, and we watch her getting caught up in one of the first passionate affairs of her life, with a French lawyer.

The novel is much more than a love story, however, as Willie gets involved in the lives of the girls facing deportation at the immigrant detention center where she volunteers as a teacher. Set in 1989, the story also contains a subplot involving the ravages of AIDS.

In a recent phone interview, the writer joked that as she was working on the multiple plot threads and themes of her first novel she realized, "Oh, wow, this is a lot!"

Making the process of controlling the sweeping narrative even more complicated was a major decision Conley made after finishing the first version of the book.

"I wrote the whole thing in the third person, but I realized that I missed the intimacy of first person," she said of her prior experience with the memoir "The Foremost Good Fortune."

Although the resulting intimacy of the storytelling could leave readers believing that much of "Paris Was the Place" is autobiographical, Conley said, "I did live in Paris in the late 1980s, but that's about it" as far as parallels with her own life go.

The brief flashbacks to the illness and death of Willie and Luke's mother are so vivid that you would swear the author went through that primal experience.

"My mother is alive and well, so I'm really taking that as a compliment. I have lost people who are dear to me and the loss (in the 1989 sections of the novel) ran parallel to a dear friend with AIDs," she said.

Adding to the depth of the novel's treament of illness was the author's own cancer diagnosis in the middle of its creation (she has since gone into remission).

"I would venture to say that had an impact on the draft I wrote after I became a cancer survivor," Conley said. "The (illness) section was one of the first sections I wrote, but I kept going back to it and refining it."

The way that the terminally sick character goes through strong and weak phases will resonate with anyone who has experienced the final months of a loved one.

"Even the most serious illness has reprieves and it tricks you," the writer said, adding that she also wanted to show the joy that is possible in the midst of a terminal medical condition.

"I didn't want there to be a steady drumbeat of illness. ... I love for readers to have pleasure, too," Conley said.

"Paris Was the Place" also gained power and depth, the author believes, by her putting the book away for three years when she went to China (an experience she wrote about in her memoir and hopes to use in her second novel).

When she returned, Conley came up with a publishing game plan than meant selling a memoir and the novel together.

"The key for me was finding an agent who liked (both books)," she said, adding that she eventually sold the memoir and the novel to Knopf as a package deal.

"Paris Was the Place" has so much going on in it that the result is a hard to categorize novel that doesn't really fit into a single genre like romantic fiction or "women's fiction."

"You can put all kinds of bells and whistles on a book, but in the end it all comes down to storytelling," Conley said.